Mexico

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Mexico

Migrants moving from Mexico to the United States represent the world's largest migration corridor, and the two countries have a long, complicated history with respect to immigration. Previously a country of emigration, Mexico increasingly has been experiencing new roles: as a country of transmigration and increasingly of settlement. The research here examines Mexico's relationship with its vast diaspora in the United States; the economic, insecurity, and other factors that have led to sizeable emigration; and the country's evolving policymaking with respect to migration.

An estimated 41.3 million immigrants lived in the United States in 2013, about 13 percent of the total U.S. population, constituting the world's largest foreign-born population. This Spotlight from MPI's Jie Zong and Jeanne Batalova offers the most current and sought-after data on immigrants in the United States—including origin, educational attainment, the unauthorized, deportations, and more—in one easy-to-use resource.

Find relevant MPI resources on the phenomenon of unaccompanied child migration—from research, articles, and public briefings that analyze the trends and policy developments surrounding the recent uptick in this migration to data on Central American immigrant populations and country profiles of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—all in one place. Clickhere.

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Since 2000, Mexico has further intensified efforts to detain and deport irregular migrants. Gabriela Diaz and Gretchen Kuhner investigate the experiences of women migrants, the majority of them from Latin America, who have been detained in Mexico en route to the United States.

Mexico has often been cited as a successful example of the positive relationship between migration and development. But Raúl Delgado-Wise and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo show why Mexico's model is unsustainable.

Both of the leading presidential candidates said during the campaign that Mexico needed to create more and better jobs to stem migration - but their approaches to the problem differ. Susan Gzesh of the University of Chicago reports.

Little is known about Americans who have retired to Latin America. MPI's David Dixon, Julie Murray, and Julia Gelatt examine the U.S. retiree population in Mexico and Panama by looking at census and visa data as well as by interviewing American retirees in various communities.

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Recent Activity

Over the past half century, migration from Mexico and Central America to the United States has been driven in part by regional demographic and human-capital trends. As the U.S. labor force became better educated, fewer native workers accepted certain low-skilled jobs. This report offers a look at the economic changes that have coincided with a Mexican and Central American population boom.

Migrant-sending and migrant-receiving countries rarely collaborate on migration issues because the structure of global migration systems ensures they often disagree about core policy issues. This report shows that migration collaboration makes sense when states share common goals they cannot achieve on their own.

This edited volume examines the development impact of diasporas in six critical areas: entrepreneurship, capital markets, "nostalgia" trade and "heritage" tourism, philanthropy, volunteerism, and advocacy.

This report provides an overview of diaspora advocacy by looking at five issues: who participates in diaspora advocacy, who or what are the “targets” in these efforts, what means are used to advance these causes, what are the issues on which they focus, and the effectiveness of the efforts.

This report explores how nostalgia trade and heritage tourism can involve diaspora populations in transactions that ease the integration of their homeland economies, while helping maintain their ties to their countries of origin or ancestry.

This report analyzes the evolving role of diaspora philanthropy in countries of origin, and examines the emergence of nongovernmental development actors and new trends in global philanthropy, such as strategic giving and use of online platforms to harness small donations.

Nearly 1 million U.S. residents spend time volunteering abroad each year, including nearly 200,000 first- and second-generation immigrants. As skilled migration and the number of U.S. youth with ancestors in the developing world grow, this report shows the potential for diaspora service volunteers to assist with development in a number of countries.

A growing body of evidence suggests that diasporas play a critical role in supporting sustainable development by transferring resources, knowledge, and ideas back to their home countries, and in integrating their countries of origin into the global economy.